My fantasy abstract paintings from the series Four Seasons. (it has nothing to do with The Four Seasons of Vivaldi; however I love his four violin concertos, especially when listen to the concertos in Venice) I painted first "Autumn in Dunchideock" acrylic painting , without the intention of it being a part of a series. But yesterday I painted Winter in Dunchideock and now I am sure that spring and summer will fallow. In both paintings I used acrylics plus lots of weird materials. My fantasies about the seasons, vou la!
My name is Mintaka. I am stranger here; I was born in the Nebula of Orion. Your species is dominant, but weird. The only time in the long calendar of the year when you are kind, forgiving, charitable and pleasant for each other is the Christmas time. It is the only time when “men and women open their shut-up hearts freely”. (One of your famous writers pointed this out a long time ago). I am not sure I understand that. Why don’t you behave in such a way on all the other days of the year? I am watching them and waiting to see you brave and beautiful. Maybe one day….
Mintaka meditating about the meaning of Christmas; mixed media made by Kasia. B. Turajczyk
Recently I made a few new images for my story about Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons. I would love to share these with you and hear your comments and criticisms about them.
I am not sure if I explained the Boltzmann Brain paradox (problem) before. This concept was one of the sources/inspiration for my story about the Shepherds of Seven from Orion and the two creatures that arrived by accident on Earth, Betelgeuse and Mintaka. They are kind of dragon like creatures, but only because my imagination created them so. They are particles, fluctuations, brain-accumulations of the knowledge of the billions of years old cosmos. The Boltzamann Brain (Boltzmann Paradox) hypothesis/idea is named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who advanced an idea that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which self-aware entities - Boltzmann brains - might arise. Such a self-aware entity may arise due only to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos.
From Wikipedia:
The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in the universe will always increase. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?
Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but this can be explained by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle.
This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.
The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.
Don Page, a famous physicist, recently wrote this about the Boltzmann Problem:
"Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”
If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.
“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.”
In other words it means our universe will die one day.
I hope I have given you some clues about the story I am writing about the two unusual creatures, Betelgeuse and Mintaka.
Here are some new images I made. I hope you will find them enjoyable and interesting.
One of my favour Russian painters is defiantly Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (Russian: Михаил Александрович Врубель, March 17, 1856 - April 14, 1910).
He is usually regarded as the greatest Russian painter of the Symbolist movement. His art is so unique and original that he shouldn't be label to any movement at all. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought probably in the Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.
Seraph based on Pushkin poem
For me personally he is a personality with a great imagination, fantasy and originality. He perfectly fits in my private gallery of unusual, bizzar, different, fantastic in art.
Vrubel was born in the Omsk city (Siberia), in a military lawyer's family and graduated from the Law Faculty of St Petersburg University in 1880. Next year he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. In his earliest works, he exhibited striking talent for drawing and highly idiosyncratic outlook. Although he still relished academic monumentality, he would later develop a penchant for fragmentory composition and "unfinished touch".
In 1884, he was summoned to replace the lost 12th-century murals and mosaics in the St. Cyril's Church of Kiev with the new ones. In order to execute this commission, he went to Venice to study the medieval Christian art. It was here that, in the words of an art historian, "his palette acquired new strong saturated tones resembling the iridescent play of precious stones". Most of his works painted in Venice have been lost, because the artist was more interested in creative process than in promoting his artwork. In 1886, he returned to Kiev, where he submitted some monumental designs to the newly-built St Volodymir Cathedral. The jury, however, failed to appreciate the striking novelty of his works, and they were rejected. At that period, he executed some delightful illustrations for Hamlet and Anna Karenina which had little in common with his later dark meditations on the Demon and Prophet themes.
While in Kiev, Vrubel started painting sketches and watercolours illustrating the Demon, a long Romantic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. The poem described the carnal passion of "an eternal nihilistic spirit" to a Georgian girl Tamara. At that period Vrubel developed a keen interest in Oriental arts, and particularly Persian carpets, and even attempted to imitate their texture in his paintings.
In 1890, Vrubel moved to Moscow. Like other artists associated with the Art Nouveau, he excelled not only in painting but also in applied arts, such as ceramics, majolics, and stained glass. He also produced architectural masks, stage sets, and costumes.
Seated Demon
In 1890 he finished his large painting of Seated Demon in the Garden (It is to see in Moscow, in Tretyakov Gallery). This painting brought notoriety to Vrubel. Most conservative critics accused him of "wild ugliness", I LOVE IT! Others like art patron Savva Mamontov praised the Demon series as "fascinating symphonies of a genius". Unfortunately the Demon, like other Vrubel's works, doesn't look as it did when it was painted, as the artist added bronze powder to his oils in order to achieve particularly luminous, glistening effects.
In 1896, he fell in love with the famous opera singer Nadezhda Zabela. Half a year later they married and settled in Moscow, where Zabela was invited by Mamontov to perform in his private opera theatre. While in Moscow, Vrubel designed stage sets and costumes for his wife, who sang the parts of the Snow Maiden, the Swan Princess, and Princess Volkhova in Rimsky-Korsakov's operas. Falling under the spell of Russian fairy tales, he executed some of his most acclaimed pieces, including Pan (1899), The Swan Princess (1900), and Lilacs (1900). In 1901, Vrubel returned to the demonic themes in the large canvas Demon Downcast. In order to astound the public with underlying spiritual message, he repeatedly repainted the demon's ominous face, even after the painting had been exhibited to the overwhelmed audience.
The last decade of his life was a very difficult one; he had a severe nervous breakdown, he was hospitalized in mental clinic. While there, he painted a mystical Pearl Oyster (1904) and striking variations on the themes of Pushkin's poem The Prophet. In 1906, overpowered by mental disease and approaching blindness, he had to give up painting.
Pan
By the way if you love movies, see Guillermo Del Toro's The Pan Labirynt. There is a such of atmosphere in this masterpiece that reminded me some of Vrubel's paintings.
Medieval art is one of my favourite art periods, I just love it.
The whole spectrum of medieval art in Europe was dominated by the Christian ideology. The architecture, the astounding Gothic cathedrals, the sculptures, the tapestries, the manuscripts, the paintings, almost every form of visual display was associated with numerous aspects of cultural behaviour, custom and communication used to illustrate Christian philosophy and dogma.
I am not a Christian and I am not a religious person but I adore medieval art even if it is full of God, Saints, religious symbols, devils, angels, and bizarre creatures – maybe all those things are the reason for my adoration of this period.
I love the colours which the artists use in their paintings, manuscripts, tapestries and the roof carvings. I find irresistible the absence of perspective however I find more irresistible the imagination of the artists who created the most incredible fantastic/ surreal paintings and ideas about the heaven’s, hell’s and the world’s hierarchies.
I am fascinated by the fact that the people of the medieval period could have lived in such intimacy with death. Life was never-ending; death was a mere interruption of the continuum; after which the soul would await the Last Judgment (heaven or the hell).
The Dance of Death by Vincent of Kastav
One of the most interesting images of death in the medieval art besides the Last Judgment is the dance macabre, the Dance of Death. It is a strange fantasy for us, but probably very consistent with the medieval acknowledgement of death and life as a continuum.
The Dance of Death by Vincent of Kasta, fragment and copy
One of the best and astonishing images of the Dance of Death is in . It is a fresco made by Vincent of Kastav around 1474. It is a very strange yet wonderful image full of all classes of men, women, children, and between them skeletons walk in procession. There are ten characters in this dance; each one is accompanied by Death. In-between the skeletons dance the pope, the cardinal, the bishop, the king, the queen, the innkeeper, the child, the maimed, the knight, and finally the merchant, who stands by a table covered with goods. The skeletons are naked and some of them play music; bagpipes, mandolins and wind instruments. The merchant, who is last in joining the dance, tries to bribe Death by pointing at his money. His efforts are futile; Death will never spare a "dancer" in exchange for mere riches.
Now it is time for me to show how James Ensor fits in to medieval art and death.
James Ensor (April 13, 1860 – November 19, 1949), one of the most famous Belgian artists was obsessed with death, grotesque masquerades, and fantastic allegories. In some point in his artistic development he turned towards religious themes as well. He interpreted them as a personal disgust for the inhumanity of the world.
The most famous painting of him is the immense "Christ's Entry into Brussels". In this painting he took on religion, politics, and art by depicting Christ entering contemporary Brussels in a Mardi gras parade. It is a vast carnival crowd in grotesque masks advancing towards the viewer. Nearly lost amid the teeming throng is Christ on his donkey. Although Ensor was an atheist, he identified with Christ as a victim of mockery.
Christ's Entry into Brussels by James Ensor
His other famous painting "Tribulation of Saint Anthony" could be seen as a modern version of the famous painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony" by Hieronymus Bosch. The work features a hooded holy man inundated by Boschian creatures floating in swampy skies -- devils and demons that fart on him and defecate. In my humble opinion this is one of his masterpieces.
Tribulation of Saint Anthony by James Ensor
I think that Ensor owes debts to medieval art, medieval artists and the medieval view of the world. The attitudes and images of the period between 500-1.000 years ago are the origin of many of his paintings.
There is a major Ensor exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City at the moment. Unfortunately "Christ's Entry into Brussels" isn't included in the Show in MoMA. But I saw it once in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
The exhibition will travel to the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, October 2009–February 2010.
